The Magdalene Tiberius

A private collector returned this portrait head of Emperor Tiberius to Italy on January 19, 2017, after it emerged that the object was stolen in 1944 from a museum near Naples.

The head surfaced on the public art market in March 2003, when Fernand Sintes put it up for auction in Paris at the PIASA Hôtel Drouot sale. Sintes claimed he had inherited it after his grandfather died, and that it was reportedly discovered in North Africa. Afterward, it was said to have been in a private collection in Algeria, belonging to the Bacri family, for decades. In 1960, it was allegedly transported to Marseille by Sintes.  

At the same PIASA auction, a piece with a matching provenance emerged — the Head of Drusus, Tiberius’ son. The auction catalog theorized that they were from the same workshop. However, Professor David Gill notes that the provenance published by PIASA lacks “any authenticated documentation.” The Drusus statue was later purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which, reported by Gill, contacted Sintes, who the museum said confirmed this provenance.

At the sale, the Tiberius head was bought by the New York-based Royal-Athena Galleries, owned by Jerome Eisenberg, who then sold it to a private collector in 2004. Art historian John Pollini published the head in a 2005 article for Antike Kunst, where it became known as the Magdalene Tiberius, named after a member of the collector’s family.

However, two scholars, Giuseppe Scarpati in 2011 and Sergio Cascella in 2013, published articles on the two heads in Italian archaeological magazines. They shared, for the first time, 1926 photographs that showed the heads when they were first discovered—during excavations in 1925-26 at the Roman theater of Sessa Aurunca in Campania. Once excavated, the heads were displayed with other statues from the same cryptoporticus in the Civic Museum of Sessa Aurunca. Both scholars suggested that the heads were stolen from the Sessa Aurunca museum in 1944, potentially by French occupational forces, and matched the heads to the two sold at auction. 

The private collector relinquished the head to Italy in 2017, the same year that the Cleveland Museum of Art repatriated its head of Drusus.